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Kyle Cranmer, an NYU assistant professor of physics, will participate in TheEconomist’s “Ideas Economy: Information” conference on June 7th and 8th at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. The conference will focus on how decision makers can better leverage the “era of big data” for individual, corporate, and social progress.

Cranmer will outline the intricacies of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), considered the world’s largest science experiment, joining other notable senior executives, strategists, innovators and public intellectuals from around the world for this two-day event.

While the era of big data presents incredible opportunities, such as smarter cities, stronger companies and better medicine, it also presents a variety of challenges since storage is scarce, systems are overloaded and many say that governments and businesses know too much. Through a mixture of engaging panel discussions, interactive dialogue, presentations, and debates, “Ideas Economy: Information” will take a fresh look at knowledge management for the information age. It will also examine security in the age of big data, managing the human-computer interface, how big data is changing global economics and more.

Located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. This machine is probing a new frontier in high-energy physics and may reveal the origin of mass of fundamental particles, the source of the illusive dark matter that fills the universe, and even extra dimensions of space.

By colliding high-energy beams in the centers of the LHC’s particle detectors, scientists hope to make discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. The debris of the collisions reveals the nature of fundamental particle interactions and may also contain as-yet undiscovered particles.

“What makes the LHC special is not just that we have big data from an enormously complicated machine, but we are also testing incredibly precise theories,” explained Cranmer. “We are undergoing a qualitative change how we perform the statistical analysis of big data and publish our results to the world.”

Cranmer is among the scientists from NYU’s Experimental High Energy Physics group that is part of this world-wide collaboration. The collaboration, ATLAS, is based at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, that employs LHC. Other members of the NYU team working on this project include Professors Andy Haas, Peter Nemethy and Allen Mincer and researchers Diego Casadei, Hooft van Huysduynen, Rostislav Konoplich, Attila Krasznahorkay, Sven Kreiss, George Lewis, Christopher Musso, Ricardo Neves, Kirill Prokofiev, and Long Zhao.

Cranmer was awarded the 2006 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent careers.

Kyle Cranmer, an NYU assistant professor of physics, will participate in The Economist’s “Ideas Economy: Information” conference on June 7th and 8th at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. The conference will focus on how decision makers can better leverage the “era of big data” for individual, corporate, and social progress.